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One more final tomorrow. No motivation whatsoever.

For those of you who are still around and aren't in a drunken stupor (I envy those who are), what is the best way to attack a general criminal law question on a final? Any tips/suggestions/thoughts/etc. are greatly appreciated!

Depending on how your final is, I found making a straight BLL outline of both the common law and MPC was extremely helpful. Our professor's questions were "assume this state uses only the MPC" or "this state uses the MPC but also considers the common law"

Having the BLL right there to compare and contrast was very helpful.

Eh, tough to see because there are so many variations in how much a given professor emphasizes MPC vs CL and stuff.. I think Crim is one of the exams where remembering "no statute listed-->COMMON LAW" is more important than others. Like in m/c I was reading a fact pattern about some kind of grocery store shoplifter or something and the choices were larceny by trick, larceny by false pretenses, embezzlement, and something frivolous/obvious.. and I spent way too much time thinking about it and it finally clicked that embezzlement/larceny by FP are FUCKING STATUTORY OFFENSES so what should have taken 10 seconds turned into like 3 minutes lol

But, in terms of the essay I think some of the bigger things profs tend to test on are a) CL homicide b) MPC homicide c) inchoate offenses/accomplice liability and maybe larceny. I've also seen an essay involving statutory interpretation pop up more often that you'd think.

I'm generalizing, of course and those are really broad categories but if you have them down good & can recognize trigger words that refer to a mental state/some kind of intent, then that's a pretty good place to start and things are likely to flow back into your memory from there. If I wasn't so concerned about my prof being a bitch of a grader, I'd bet money that I got an A on my crim exam (just throwing that out FWIW)